Chemical Wedding by Robyn Ewing
Winner of the 2002 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Final judge, Fanny Howe

“These poems are unconventional, deep, independent, un-American, all-American, hip, tragic, observant, skitterish, critical, political, crushed, brushed, funny. It is the range of motion and emotion in them that makes them matter."
— Fanny Howe, final judge and author of Selected Poems, Forged, Q, One Crossed Out, O’Clock, and Nod

“ Chemical Wedding is a startling debut collection. Wild and wonderfully unpredictable in its motions of mind, in its curiosities, and in the wide-ranging array of its experiences, it is differently wild in its voicing and formal strategies. It is rare to find a first book so mature and yet so sturdily and willfully original.

At times flighty, at times downright wise, everywhere wired with joy and a sense of wonder, this is a book that defies most of the stylistic categories of recent poetry and ends up giving one—for all its intelligence and determined structure—a sense of freshness, a restorative sense of the basic in the complex, all surface difficulty dissolving into poems that are plain and simply a joy to read.”
— Jorie Graham, author of Never, Swarm, The Dream of the Unified Field, and The Errancy

Robyn Ewing was born in Philadelphia. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in poetry and from Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars with an MA in fiction. Before returning to school for writing, she was an editorial art director for magazines in New York and Los Angeles. This is her first collection.

Poetry
January 2003
1-885635-04-4
$14.95 Paper
112 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4